- From: Wilson, MD (Michael) <M.D.Wilson@rl.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 13:41:22 +0100
- To: "'Dan Brickley'" <danbri@w3.org>, Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Cc: Bill Andersen <andersen@ontologyworks.com>, pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>, Ziv Hellman <ziv@unicorn.com>, www-rdf-logic@w3.org
In the early/mid 1990's the hypertext research community looked down on the web as having little innovation, but only taking established techniques from their research world. Doing something understood, but on a more global scale. In the semantic web W3C must do the same thing. Take the KR and inference mechanisms that are understood and accepted from AI/logic programming and apply them on the global scale. If RDF or the Semantic Web start to demand innovative research developments in KR or inferencing, then there are the associated research risks. It is not appropriate for a W3C enterprise to take on those risks - the Semantic web should be treated by the KR and inference mechanism community with the same contempt that the hypertext research community treated the web in the early 1990's - nothing really new, just more global and robustly defined. There were divisions in the hypertext community about alternative approaches which that community well understood in 1990. There are divisions in the KR and inference mechanism community (e.g. neat vs scruffy) which that community well understands. W3C must respect the KR and inference mechanism community, understand those strong divisions and facilitate a standardisation of representation and inference to achieve the requirements in the Semantic Web Activity Statement. If experienced guys like Pat Hayes, and Drew McDermott see the Semantic Web as taking a course which is of detailed research interest (e.g. promiscuous reification without nested quantification) then W3C is doing something wrong. There is a further sensitivity, that industry is intended to adopt the Semantic Web products. The industrial world had no experience of distributed hypertext in the early 1990s. There are many industrial managers who have memories of the 1980s expert system bandwagon when the lost a lot of money investing in technologies without a clear view of business benefits and the limits of those technologies. If the semantic web looks like a repeat of that, they will immediately ignore it. Again, W3C must be very clear about the exact purpose of the technologies it facilitates, and their robustness. Prof Michael Wilson Chair, W3C Office in the UK Information Technology Department tel: +44 (0)1235 44 6619 CLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory fax: +44(0)1235 44 5597 Chilton, DIDCOT, Oxon, OX11 0QX, UK WWW: http://www.itd.clrc.ac.uk/Person/M.D.Wilson The contents of this email are sent in confidence for the use of the intended recipients only. If you are not one of the intended recipients do not take action on it or show it to anyone else, but return this email to the sender and delete your copy of it -----Original Message----- From: Dan Brickley [mailto:danbri@w3.org] Sent: 17 May 2001 15:50 To: Dan Connolly Cc: Bill Andersen; pat hayes; Ziv Hellman; www-rdf-logic@w3.org Subject: Re: What do the ontologists want On Thu, 17 May 2001, Dan Connolly wrote: [...] > But that sounds an awful lot like what folks were saying > about global hypertext in 1991. Sorry Dan, but I just don't buy into this "we showed them then, we'll show them again" bravado, which is also evident in the recent (otherwise very useful) Scientific American piece: http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html [[ [...] Knowledge representation, as this technology is often called, is currently in a state comparable to that of hypertext before the advent of the Web: it is clearly a good idea, and some very nice demonstrations exist, but it has not yet changed the world. ]] The history of embedding machine-processable references in electronic documents (hypertext) is short, interesting, and really very different to the long and well documented history of knowledge representation. Go read http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/categories.html and tell me that the year 2001 is to KR as the year 1989 was to electronic hypertext. OK, so the WWW successfully strips down some ideas floating in around in the hypertext community, and successfully applied them on the Internet. We all gained a lot from this. But I see no reason whatsoever for this to bolster out confidence that the same trick can be played with KR. It's an entirely different kettle of fish... What next? WWW-Physics, WWW-Chemistry, where we apply our "simplify it so it scales" methodology to some other disciplines previously bedevilled by unnecessary complexity? What makes WWW-Logic special? We need to treat a complex and ancient field with the respect it deserves; to draw an analogy between KR and the (really very handy) ability to shove hyperlinks in structured textfiles is just crass. Dan -- mailto:danbri@w3.org http://www.w3.org/People/DanBri/
Received on Friday, 18 May 2001 08:41:31 UTC